AA-2026-B14995
On the image
Somebody's coffee table or den wall once held this folded relief map of Oahu, the kind of souvenir cartography that turned an island into a lump of injection-moulded plastic and called it education. The mapmakers picked mustard yellow for the mountains and a defeated olive green for the lowlands, on the theory that tourists would rather see Hawaii as a topographic diagram than as a place people actually lived.
Honolulu sits crowded with tiny labels on the right, Pearl Harbor's lochs branch out like something under a microscope, and the whole west end fades into a sun-bleached blank where the photographer's lamp overexposed the paper. Every ridge and gulch is rendered with the confident precision of a survey team that assumed a vacationer would want to trace the actual drainage pattern of a volcanic island before flying home.
By the 1960s Hawaii was two years into statehood and jet service had just made it a weekend proposition instead of an ocean crossing, so maps like this were printed by the thousands to reassure new arrivals that the place had been thoroughly measured before they got there.
Visually related — by likeness
Raised-Relief Tourist Map of Oahu, Hawaii, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-B14995. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/raised-relief-tourist-map-of-oahu-hawaii-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026B14995,
title = {Raised-Relief Tourist Map of Oahu, Hawaii, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-B14995},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/raised-relief-tourist-map-of-oahu-hawaii-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Raised-Relief Tourist Map of Oahu, Hawaii, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-B14995 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/raised-relief-tourist-map-of-oahu-hawaii-1960s ER -
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